Quote 5
Comrade,
I did not want to kill you. . . . But you were only an idea to me
before, an abstraction that lived in my mind and called forth its
appropriate response. . . . I thought of your hand-grenades, of
your bayonet, of your rifle; now I see your wife and your face and
our fellowship. Forgive me, comrade. We always see it too late.
Why do they never tell us that you are poor devils like us, that
your mothers are just as anxious as ours, and that we have the same
fear of death, and the same dying and the same agony—Forgive me, comrade;
how could you be my enemy?
Paul utters these words in Chapter Nine
to the corpse of Gérard Duval, the French soldier whom he has just
killed. Paul realizes for the first time that, despite the dictates
of nationalism, Duval is fundamentally no different from him. As
Duval becomes a fully realized person in Paul’s mind, as he thinks
beyond the man’s weapons to “your wife and your face and our fellowship,”
Paul observes, as he does in Chapter Eight among the Russian prisoners,
that the war has forced men who are not enemies to fight each other.
The propaganda campaigns waged by the opposing governments have
convinced many men that their opponents are evil; as such, Paul
initially conceives of the French soldier as “an abstraction”—the
enemy. Once he understands Duval as a human being, the artificial
divisions between the two men become irrelevant. Paul’s sympathy
for Duval’s suffering is evident in his address of him as “comrade”
and his reference to himself and Duval as “we” and “us,” in opposition to
the “they”—those in power, who attempt to deny the essential sameness
of men such as Paul and Duval.
